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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) defended his accusation that Obama doesn’t love America by arguing that Obama’s upbringing by a white mother and attendance of a white school made his statement not racist.

“Some people thought it was racist — I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools, and most of this he learned from white people,” Giuliani said in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday.

All the GOP candidates now will be asked if they agree or disagree. They need to throw Rude Rudy under the bus. He was always too big for his britches anyway. How can anyone assess how much someone else loves their country? Political tomfoolery.

His 9-11 big-shotting would gag a maggot. He can’t claim to be more deeply affected than everyone else.

Giuliani keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper. Let the comedy begin.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday decried a reported comment from a senior Obama administration official that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was “a chickensh—,” saying the remark was “disgraceful.”

Appearing at The Atlantic’s Ideas Forum in Washington, the top U.S. diplomat condemned the attack from an unnamed administration official and said it didn’t reflect President Barack Obama or his values.

“We condemn anybody who uses language such as was used in this article,” Kerry said, in response to the report in The Atlantic. “That does not reflect the president, it does not reflect me. It is disgraceful, unacceptable, damaging. And I think neither President Obama, nor I — I’ve never heard that word around me in the White House, or anywhere.”

The second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy arrived Wednesday in a region where recovery in New Jersey and New York is happening unevenly, with many houses, boardwalks and businesses rebuilt but many people still unable to return to their homes.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke to a crowd in Belmar, N.J., a town damaged by the storm, defending his administration’s handling of the rebuilding. Christie was repeatedly interrupted by a heckler, which prompted him to tell the man “Sit down and shut up.”

Ken Burns’ seven-part PBS series on the lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, is a remarkable achievement. Burns sheds a poignant new light on the personal and public lives of three monumental figures in 20th Century American history. And in doing so, he illustrates the relative rottenness of the hacks, partisans, and plutocrats who make up the political class that rules America today.

By exploring the lives and times of TR, FDR, and ER Burns shows that in our not-so-distant past the governing institutions of this country were actually responsive to the needs and desires of working-class Americans. This superb and moving portrait is a perfect fit for our times. The utter failure of our current “leaders” is glaring by comparison.

Yes, TR was a warmonger, and FDR signed the order that imprisoned innocent Japanese Americans. There are long lists of both presidents’ failures. But we shouldn’t let those flaws bury the fact that both TR and FDR were not afraid to stand up to big corporations and Wall Street if they viewed their actions as damaging to the country. That alone is probably the biggest difference between those leaders of the early decades of the 20th Century and today.

The Iowa primary is going earthy early this year. First of all, Joni Ernest, Republican state senator from Iowa, gave her state a “let’s make ’em squeal” commercial. In a well-done political ad, she gave her prospective constituency a brief bio, telling them that she grew up on a farm castrating pigs so she knew how to slice and dice pork. Now we have Bob Quast threatening to blow someone’s “balls off” if they come to his door to harm his daughters. Quast’s sister was apparently murdered by a sexual predator.

Will this kind of bluntness attract voters? Does a filters-off ad appeal more to voters? Maybe in Iowa. I think Washington, DC is a little too pristine and white glove for this type of ad. How about the kids who might hear these commercials. Is it sending a good signal?

Do we want our politics to have this violent of an image? Finally, is there anything we can do about it even if we object? Voting with your remote seems like great over-simplification.

Quast is running as an independent. Ernest is a Republican. I can only speculate what the Democratic opponent will come up with.

Is Fredericks actually saying that the tea party is going to cause the Republicans to crash and burn at the election? it sure sounds like it to me.

I am just not one to count chickens before they hatch.

The reality is, very few people are far right or far left anythings. The people who win elections are those who appeal to the middle. Elections are won and lost by the middle, not by the purists of either political extreme.

As I touched base with many of my Republican buds, I believe most of them were speechless.

I saw this happen many years ago, before there was such a thing as a tea party. Ollie North and Michael Farris were somehow involved. It was then I made my resolution to never attend another Republican convention, as a vendor or anything else.

At a time when the Republican Party’s image is at an historic low, 62% of the public says the GOP is out of touch with the American people, 56% think it is not open to change and 52% say the party is too extreme.Opinions about the Democratic Party are mixed, but the party is viewed more positively than the GOP in every dimension tested except one. Somewhat more say the Republican Party than the Democratic Party has strong principles.

Do you think these findings are accurate? Who has the strongest principles? I think it is all in how principles are defined. I would certainly agree that the GOP has a more solidified set of ideologies. Just compare the 2 platforms. However, I think that rigidity is part of being extreme.

How are the Democrats out of touch? How are the Republicans out of touch? This is all opinion of course. Define ‘out of touch.’

I used to think my grandmother was out of touch when I was a young woman. I thought she was old fashioned. The older I got, the more I realized much of that out of touch thinking was really truisms of life. She bestowed a gift on me.

There is out of touch and then there is out of touch. To quote that great poet of the 60’s, The Times They are a’Changing. You had better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone for the times they are a’changing.

Yesterday, President Obama made 4 recess appointments. He appointed 3 people to the Board of Labor Relations and 1 to the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB appointment is the most contentious.

The new head, Richard Cordray, received an appointment even though the chamber was technically only in session every few days. Technically seems to be the big IF. The senate technically did not recess over the holiday, so there was no precedent for what President Obama did.

When Republicans took control of the House, going into pro forma sessions became the norm since neither chamber can recess for longer than three days without the consent of the other.

But now that Obama has decided that pro forma sessions don’t matter much, Republicans warn there is no stopping presidents from undermining the Senate’s traditional advise-and-consent role.

Senators who live close by in Maryland and Virginia are usually the ones who come in and gavel a session into formal existence and then close the session. The pro forma sessions only last minutes.

We shall see if the Obama maneuver works. The objection apparently wasn’t over Richard Cordray but rather the agency he is now the head of. I simply do not understand why anyone would be against consumer protection. People get scammed all the time and there is very little out there to protect the consumer. I welcome someone out there looking out for the little guy in a world that allows him to be continually screwed by banks, loan sharks, payday loan outfits, student loans, etc.

Why are conservatives against the average Joe getting protection from those who prey on others? We haven’t heard the end of this one.

Conservative website mogul Andrew Breitbart has quit the advisory board for GOProud, saying he has a “zero tolerance” policy for outing people.

Trouble started when GOProud’s Jimmy LaSalvia and Chris Barron reacted to an antigay Rick Perry television ad by angrily taking to Twitter, attacking pollster Tony Fabrizio.

“I’ve just about had it with faggots who line their pockets with checks from antigay homophobes while throwing the rest of us under the bus,” LaSalvia wrote.

GOProud issued a statement defending itself from the ensuing backlash, but that apparently only contributed to Breitbart’s disappointment.

“I have a zero tolerance attitude toward the intentional infliction of vocational and family harm by divulging the details of an individual’s sexual orientation as a weapon of political destruction,” Breitbart wrote on one of his websites, BigGovernment.com. Breitbart said he’d long ago told LaSalvia and Barron about his opinion on outing, which Breitbart said contributed to his “evolution from the political left to the right.”

President Barack Obama said Thursday it was just common sense to keep girls under the age of 17 from being able to buy a morning-after contraceptive pill off a drugstore shelf. Citing his own two daughters, Obama said: “I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”

Plenty of pediatric leaders and women’s advocacy groups did not, as reaction flowed in to the administration’s decision to prevent the over-the-counter sale of the anti-pregnancy drug to sexually active girls of younger ages.

Critics said politics had trumped science, again.

Yes, pretty much. President Obama, when he took office, pledged a commitment to scientific integrity. President Obama has said that he had nothing to do with the decision but does support Sebelius.